


personal effects

by wolfchasing



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Grief/Mourning, Love Letters, M/M, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2021-01-03 00:15:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21170249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolfchasing/pseuds/wolfchasing
Summary: "Belonged. None of these things are actually his. They are the effects of a dead man, of someone he no longer is. None of it takes place in his heart, or sings with the emotion that he knew he once had for these empty, lifeless objects."Hugh reflects, grieves.





	personal effects

His former personal effects arrive to him piecemeal, box by box, delivered to him by starry eyed redshirts. There’s no rhyme or reason to their order. Books are mixed in with clothes, ceramics in with old medical journal datasticks. 

At first, he wonders if this is Paul’s petty way of expressing his annoyance at Hugh asking for time, and the too-familiar rise of anger swirls inside of him again. But after he calms himself down and he realises that Paul is probably just sending things along in order of him realising which items in his quarters actually belong to Hugh. Likely waiting until another box is filled before sending it along the bureaucratic pipeline that comes with returning from the dead.

_ Belonged _ . None of these things are actually his. They are the effects of a dead man, of someone he no longer is. None of it takes place in his heart, or sings with the emotion that he knew he once had for these empty, lifeless objects.

Regardless, he lifts each of the items from their cardboard prisons and sets about placing them somewhere in his new quarters. Even if he no longer feels any emotions for these items, they at least make the standard issue Starfleet quarters look better, and Hugh is nothing if not mildly proud of his aesthetic.

He’s looking into one such box now, the latest arrival – and this one is mostly books. Actual paper books. Tucked into every available space are some odd little trinkets that he once collected, when his early days of being in Starfleet Medical took him from base to base. He picks up one of them, a tiny metallic sculpture of the tallest peak of the mountainous world of Denuba, and he feels nothing. He spent the entirety of his residency working and hiking in and around the Denubian Alps, and now, the memory has nothing else attached to it. It’s almost like he’s read the most impersonal, clinical diary of a person’s life. Cushioning everything, there’s a blue and white striped scarf wrapped around them (which, when he picks it up to try and recall where it came from, it releases an earthy, citric scent that he instantly, disconcertingly connects with Paul.

He shoves the scarf and the trinket back into the box, suddenly furious again, and upset that he’s furious. He has no idea why he’s so angry, and all he wants is for it to stop, to feel any other emotion other than pure, throbbing anger.

Instead, he grabs one of the books, not caring which, and the sensation of his fingertips dragging along the hard cloth-bound cover - a sensation that he has not yet experienced in this new, unbroken body - makes him shiver from head to toe. There’s something in that motion that he can’t quite identify, and comes so automatically, so unexpectedly that it makes him drop the book.

His anger is gone, now replaced with curiosity. There is a strange curl of emotion in his gut as he leans down to the book. It’s fallen open to a page, and the ease of the motion tells him that it’s a page that he had turned to again and again and again, and he recognises it now.

Paul gave him this book early in their acquaintance. A book of poetry – something he’s usually not terribly interested in, but Paul had extolled the virtues of it and praised the prose over and over again during their many conversations in the early days of their long distance relationship. Hugh expressed interest in reading it once, and had thought nothing more of it until a package had arrived with his name on it and this exact book inside.

Hugh remembers enjoying it, not for the content, but for the obvious love that Paul had held for it. The poetry had been anything but florid, and actually quite grim at times, reminding him of a more interstellar version of Robert Frost. It had been easy to see how it, with its clear devotion to the darker, grittier sides of nature and the beauty within that, had appealed so strongly to Paul.

However, the page that’s fallen open isn’t to any poem. It’s an intentional blank space between the pieces of writing, designed to give the reader a breather between two of the grimmer pieces. Drawn in ink around the edges of the double-page are Victorian-style botanical illustrations of Paul’s astromycological samples – Paul’s own drawings, beautifully rendered in the four-hundred-year old style. 

Between the illustrations is a letter, a handwritten letter, written in a spidery, cursive script that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a 19th century journal, but Hugh knows was written just ten years prior.

He knows exactly what it says – he remembers reading it for the first time, and then again, and again, until the words had been forever seared into his memory, and it seems that mycelial resurrection hadn’t taken that from him.

He sits down, places the book in his lap, and begins to idly trace his fingertips over the drawings, feeling for the grooves in the paper where a pen nib had made scratchy indentations, and he begins to read.

_ Hugh, _

_ It worries me, how much I think I love you. _

_ It started so gradually that I can’t recall when I realised. _

_ You are a world away. So far, so distant. And yet, despite the space between us, all I have to do is open my communicator and you’ll be there, ready to make fun of my food, or laugh at a joke, or bitch about my colleagues with me, or find our commonalities in the most banal and unexpected aspects of our lives. _

_ Until I met you, I was actually truly awful at the banalities of life. I couldn’t stand small talk and I could barely stomach anything that wasn’t in my own little niche. I have a busy mind, you know that. But you slow me down, in the best kind of way. With you, I can talk about everything and nothing, all at the same time, and never get distracted away by anything else, because you are always the most interesting thing to me. _

_ We’ve only been able to meet once in person, and it was nowhere near long enough. I thought that perhaps, seeing you in real life, where you couldn’t hide your faults behind pretty, well-considered words, that the stars would be cleared from my eyes. That perhaps, if I was to meet you, I would get over myself, speed back up, and stop falling completely head-over-heels for you. I honestly did hope that, because this, to me, is terrifying. _

_ None of my relationships have ever endured like this, and I was so scared by what I was feeling. _

_ But the second I saw you and your chest crashed against mine, firm and warm and welcoming, and my hands came up to the back of your head, desperate to increase the contact between us by any means necessary, I knew then that I was completely and utterly fucked. _

_ I was so sure that after that, you’d come to realise that I was an annoyance and not worth the effort, as so many others have done with me in the past. I was used to it. But by the time I was on the shuttle back to my lab, waiting to leave the place that you call home, waiting for it to take me away from you, you were already sending me messages and jokes and heartfelt words about us and our weekend together. _

_ And you never stopped. You never got bored of me, or annoyed, or so frustrated that you threw in the towel completely. It’s honestly amazing that you haven’t gotten sick of me yet. _

_ I don’t know where we sit. We are certainly more than friends – you feel like the other half of my soul, returning to me after Zeus and his bolts split us apart. Yes, I will quote musical theatre at you, for as long as you try to make me love opera. _

_ All I know is that I want us to be so much more. _

_ I want us to be everything. _

_ I hope I haven’t scared you off. If I have, <strike>come back to me, please</strike>, I’m sorry. But it hurts too much to keep this in any longer. Even if you don’t want what I do, that’s okay. Your friendship is not a consolation prize – it is the most important and vital thing to me. And hopefully, from that, other things will grow, but they don’t have to. _

_ With all my love, in friendship and hopefully beyond, _

_ Paul. _

  
  


A droplet hits the page, then another, and another. The waterproof ink beneath it thankfully doesn’t blur, because Hugh doesn’t know what he’d do if he lost this as well – this tangible reminder of life, emotion, love and everything that had come before.

The cardboard box of his personal effects stay where they are on the little table at the end of his boring, lonely, single room. His hand goes lax and the book falls from his grasp to hit the floor for the second time that evening. 

Hugh places his head in his hands, sobbing, and finally, finally permits himself to grieve.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in an hour at midnight because I Love To Feel Pain.
> 
> Much love to my beta readers, Aphelyon and Cygfa. <3


End file.
